1. The existing ones are great, but I often find that I can't find the right emoticon to fit my emotion.

2. UKMix is a very fun and friendly place. I think some more wackier and miscellanious emoticons may allow us to express our inner craziness better!

3. When you're writing a message, there seems to be plenty of room there at the side for some more.

4. If the admins don't want to draw any more, I'd be happy to make some myself. I love this kind of thing, and I have experience!

5. If we did it, we could have the whole gang make suggestions for the new emoticons, based on the emotions they most often need to express. That in itself might be fun.

6. If you think of those little emoticons as people, then maybe they're lonely. Maybe it would be good to give them some new friends?

7. Go on, do it for him:

While I'm here... what ever happened to the idea of having gender icons, or country "flag" icons? If I recall correctly, people liked the idea and I was wiling to supply the graphics. We just need someone to go tweak that php!

Something tells me that the emoticons are a fixed set that go with the forums design. However, I do believe that there's some of these we don't currently use (as I'm on another forum which has a few other ones).

Well don't worry about where to get the emoticons from, I can supply any graphics if it's needed. If someone sees an emoticon on another site they like then I could convert it into the same style as the ones already on here (the last thing we want is inconsistent emoticon styles, right?)

If you (the admins) are just using a generic forum code and you didn't program this yourself, then adding more emoticons wouldn't be too difficult.

I would do the following...

1. Do a search in the php code that generates the "post a reply" pages. Search for "icon_biggrin.gif" and you should find a table with all the emoticons in it.

If the contents of this table are not dynamically generated, then you should be able to just add more rows and columns to the html by copying and pasting the existing ones and just changing the graphics and the "ascii smiley code" that's written to the message.

If the contents of the emoticon table are dynamically generated then probably each emoticon will have a row assigned to it in a mysql database table, with a corresponding "used/unused" flag and probably a column for the ascii smiley code and a column for the image location. In which case you should be able to just manually edit this table to add more smilies without changing a line of code.

2. Do a search in the php code that writes the thread. Search for ": evil :" and you should find a procedure that searches the text for the ascii smiley codes and you should be able to just copy and paste more procedures.

On HTF they have an animated puking smiley that goes like this: I can link to it externally with the img tag but having it as a default using :puke: would be easier. That fills the "Grossed out one" I suppose.

I don't care how cold cold cold it is in your hole hole hole, but you CANNOT have my sweater!